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Sifting the Karakum

For 12 years, Tatyana Shikmuradova has wondered if her husband is alive or dead. Authorities in her country, Turkmenistan, have answered none of her queries.

Her husband, former Foreign Minister Boris Shikmuradov, was one of dozens arrested, charged, sentenced and jailed within days of a purported assassination attempt on former Turkmen dictator Saparmurat Niyazov on November 25, 2002. The New York Times characterized the show trials aired on Turkmenistan’s state-run television at the time as “the most chilling public witch hunt since Stalin.”

At his trial, Shikmuradov – whom the police claimed to have “picked up with drugs in his pockets” – admitted to being an “addict” and a “thug.” Sentenced to 25 years, Shikmuradov’s prison term was increased to life the day after his trial. His sentincing was clearly political, activists say.

“I need to know where my husband is,” Tatyana Shikmuradova pleads in a new video released by Human Rights Watch to mark the anniversary. “For the past 12 years now I haven’t been able to get any information.”

The video is part of the Prove They Are Alive campaign, which demands Turkmenistan provide proof of life of the missing, or admit they are dead. From Human Rights Watch’s statement:

A meeting of CIS government heads over the weekend came and went with little media attention, an indicator both of the lack of importance prime ministers are accorded in the former Soviet Union and of the organization’s general redundancy.

Conceived to keep the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union together in a loose confederation, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) had lost much of its mojo even before one-time member Georgia departed in 2008 and fresher affiliations – such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Moscow’s Eurasian Economic Union – began gathering geopolitical prominence.

The CIS now includes Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as full members, with Turkmenistan and Ukraine as participants. As Russian President Vladimir Putin said in 2005, the organization is best conceived as “a civilized divorce” between former partners, in spite of periodic and half-hearted attempts to turn it into something more.

For that reason, even the CIS Summit of Heads of Government on November 21 and 22 in Ashgabat had a damp squib feel to it. Although Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov was there to greet delegates and hold bilateral talks, the Turkmen, Azeri and Uzbek delegations were formally represented by their respective deputy prime ministers. Ukraine and Moldova, meanwhile, sent ambassadors to head up low-key delegations.

Iran, it seems, was calling Turkmenistan’s bluff earlier this summer when Tehran said it no longer needs gas from its northern neighbor. Now a top official says Tehran will keep buying.

That is good news for Turkmenistan, which is so dependent on its main gas customer, China, that it is starting to look like a client state.

Iran is committed to increasing its own domestic gas production to up to a billion cubic meters per day by 2017, a target one industry analyst thinks is possible but unlikely within such a tight timeframe. But supplying Iran’s northern regions with domestic gas is complicated by its lack of infrastructure. So, since 1997, Iran has bought gas from Turkmenistan to service its north, and sold its own gas abroad.

Deputy Oil Minister Hamid Reza Araqi said this week that his boss and Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov had met in Ashgabat this month to hammer out a new purchase agreement. According to regional news agency AKIpress, the meeting happened November 7.

“The deal makes it possible to raise the amount imported from Turkmenistan in cold months of the winter; starting in the beginning of the current year, Turkmenistan has exported 24-25 million cubic meters of natural gas to Iran [daily],” said Araqi, in comments carried in English by Iran’s Mehr news agency on November 19.

The agreement contains a provision to increase this to 30 million cubic meters daily, he added.

With the arrival of November, the serfs trickle home from Turkmenistan’s cotton fields. But a culture of state employees being forced to labor in menial jobs continues throughout the year, says an annual monitoring report. As they wait for the fields to bloom again with “white gold,” low-skilled municipal workers such as janitors and security guards are obliged to do free housekeeping for Turkmen bureaucrats, and to travel to faraway cities to participate in cleanups for the state, the report alleges.

Turkmenistan’s Central Asian neighbor Uzbekistan is usually the focus of international flak for mobilizing its citizens – notably students – to harvest cotton each fall. But totalitarian Turkmenistan, which produces more cotton per person than Uzbekistan, is just as keen on exploiting its bloated public sector for field hands, according to the October 14 briefing, published by Alternative Turkmenistan News (ATN), a service run by Turkmen exiles who partner with Amnesty International and the Norwegian Helsinki Committee.

Drawing on domestic accounts, the second annual report provides an important insight into Turkmenistan’s labor market. It pays particular attention to Turkmenistan’s low-paid state employees who have limited means to defend their rights in a country where de facto unemployment is high and cowed government workers can be replaced easily.

Turkmenistan marked Independence Day this week. While parts of the gas-rich country were experiencing gas shortages, there was no shortage of pomp and prosperity on display in Ashgabat on October 27. President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov was in attendance and some of the choreography – like an Akhal-Teke horse, his favorite breed, drawn out of Kalashnikovs – must have been especially pleasing to the horse-mad leader.

A photographer in Ashgabat sent EurasiaNet.org these images, which are used with permission.

Turkmenistan has the world’s fourth-largest natural gas reserves and exports billions of dollars worth of gas every year. But its copious reserves are apparently not enough to ensure a stable supply for residents of this isolated, totalitarian country.

Shortages in northern villages prompted a rare protest on October 28, reports the Chronicles of Turkmenistan, a news website run by exiles. Several dozen women blocked a highway to draw officials’ attention to the shortages, which come with the onset of autumn and are affecting residents’ ability to heat their homes and cook. The shortages, says Chronicles, have even hit Dashoguz, a town of about 200,000 people:

Residents have repeatedly called on gas providers [for help], but the latter complain that very little gas is being delivered; moreover, the pipes and equipment are very run-down, while specialists capable of maintaining all this in working order are simply nowhere to be found. The authorities are not providing either the funds or the pipes to repair gas mains.

A German national’s successful lawsuit against Turkmenistan’s government after Ashgabat expropriated his poultry farm offers insight into some of the unusual tricks the isolated Central Asian country can hatch on investors.

The Washington D.C.-based International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes found in favor of Turkish-born German businessman Adem Dogan on August 12, Investment Arbitration Reporter (IAReporter) wrote last month. The amount of the award was not disclosed.

Dogan entered the Turkmen market in 1999 during the reign of the capricious Saparmurat Niyazov—who fancied himself Turkmenbashi, the “Father of the Turkmen.” Working with a local partner, Dogan’s egg farm soon became the largest of its kind in Turkmenistan, a country that sources most of its eggs from neighboring Iran.

According to a 2008 report by Bloomberg, not everyone was thrilled with Dogan’s project. Rather than seeing the farm as a way to ensure food security, Niyazov saw its success as a national humiliation. Citing transcripts of cabinet meetings in the totalitarian country, Bloomberg noted that “Niyazov harangued ministers, asking them why it took a foreigner to run a successful chicken farm.”

The project fell apart after control over the farm’s lease was transferred from the Ministry of Agriculture to the Ministry of Defense. Turkmenistan’s army chiefs “began to pressure the operators for a share of profits, and later, for ownership of the entire firm” with “godfather-style offers,” according to IAReporter’s brief on the court hearings.

Turkmenistan may have become a byword for slow-moving regional rail projects, but a long-planned link connecting the country and neighboring Uzbekistan to the Persian Gulf via Iran appears to have found momentum again.

At a “high level meeting” in Ashgabat on September 3, delegates from the three countries plus Oman and Qatar began ironing out details of a plan first agreed in April 2011, Trend.az reported. That meeting came just under a month after the Turkmen and Uzbek foreign ministers held talks on the project with their counterparts in Oman.

Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov first proposed the railroad in 2010. For his double-landlocked country, the project assumes a special significance. Some have noted that it could ease exports of Tashkent’s key cotton crop toward markets in the Middle East and beyond. Tashkent is particularly keen to facilitate trade ties with manufacturers indifferent to widespread evidence it uses forced labor to harvest its lucrative cash crop. Last year according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Uzbekistan produced 904,000 metric tons of cotton. Turkmenistan, which produced 327,000 metric tons over the same period, could also benefit from the line.

For most Muslims the pilgrimage to Mecca is a sacred duty to be completed at least once in a lifetime. But Turkmenistan’s Muslim-majority population should surely receive divine dispensation. Under restrictions imposed by the authoritarian government, an eager pilgrim can wait over 10 years to receive permission to perform the haj.

Every country has a quota, a limit to how many Muslims it can send on haj each year. Turkmenistan is facilitating travel for only one-seventh of its quota this year, despite the long waiting lists, Oslo-based religious-freedom watchdog Forum 18 reported on August 25:

Muslims in Balkan Region of western Turkmenistan have to wait on average between eight and eleven years to reach the top of the waiting list to join the state-organized haj pilgrimage to the Muslim holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, an official of the regional Religious Affairs office told Forum 18 News Service from Balkanabad on 21 August. Turkmenistan's government is allowing just under a seventh of the haj quota allocated by the Saudi authorities to travel this October to Mecca. "Turkmenistan is one of the governments not doing all it can to help pilgrims," a Saudi consular official told Forum 18 from Ashgabat.

Ninety percent of Turkmenistan’s exports are hydrocarbons. And 70 percent of all Turkmenistan’s exports went to China last year. So news that Iran, one of the country’s top three gas buyers, will soon stop importing Turkmen gas cannot be welcome in Ashgabat. It is almost like Turkmenistan threw off the Russian yoke only to shoulder China’s.

On August 11, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said Iran would no longer need Turkmen gas as of next year, news agency Trend.az quoted him as saying. Zanganeh explained that Iran is ramping up domestic production.

It is quite a turn of events for Turkmenistan. In early 2010 a new, second pipeline bringing Turkmen gas to Iran was launched. At that time leaders in the two countries spoke about gas imports to Iran reaching up to 20 billion cubic meters (bcm) annually. A new gas-compressor station started operation in western Turkmenistan in December 2013, built specifically to export more gas to Iran.

About Sifting the Karakum

The Karakum, or "black sand" desert, covers 70 percent of Turkmenistan’s surface. Population is sparse there, with only one person per 2.5 miles. Rain might come once in a decade. Underneath this austere territory lies the ancient city of Merv, near today's Mary, whose ruins are still studied by scholars around the world, as well as a great deal of oil and gas, making Turkmenistan's reserves among the largest in the world.

Little of the country’s closed political system has changed since President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov succeeded long-time dictator Saparmurat Niyazov – the Turkmenbashi, or “father of all Turkmen” – in 2006. Civic activists continue to be harassed, detained, or forced to leave the country. All lines of power lead to the president, who maintains a harsh top-down management of subordinate officials who are constantly reprimanded, shuffled around, or dismissed for "shortcomings" and "negligence."

With so much of what happens in Turkmenistan hidden or deliberately suppressed, it is our hope to sift through what stories do emerge in domestic and international media, and attempt to see the true dimensions of a country whose impoverished people rarely see the benefits of their nation's tremendous wealth.

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